Wireless stations (e.g., wireless laptop computers) in a static, multi-hop wireless network receive and transmit information referred to as packets of data. Upon receiving a packet, a station must determine how and where to route the packet. That is, each station determines whether the packet needs to be forwarded to a next wireless station and, if so, the station must determine the identity of the next station, etc. There are various routing techniques in existence. However, many of them are complex and require a station to perform multiple tasks and take up significant overhead, all of which use some part of the limited battery power/energy (collectively “energy”) available to a station.
Energy considerations are almost always important. However, in static, multi-hop wireless networks, they are very important. In such networks, packets from a source wireless station (i.e., source of a packet or message) may need to be routed through many intermediate stations before reaching their final destination wireless station. If one of the stations along the path the packets must travel fails because it runs out of available energy (i.e., its batteries run down), the packets cannot be relayed through that station. This may prevent the packets (and their associated messages) from reaching their ultimate destination unless a suitable back-up path can be quickly identified and utilized.
It is, therefore, important to make efficient use of the limited energy available to wireless stations in a static, multi-hop wireless network. In general, the more complex the routing technique, the more energy needed to implement such a technique.
When packets are routed between source and destination stations, a packet necessarily travels over numerous, small intermediate routes. To implement such a routing technique within each wireless station, which is the norm for multi-hop wireless networks, requires complex processing. In effect, this means that each wireless station in the network must maintain a complex software or firmware program associated with the routing technique which, when executed, takes up large amounts of computational time and energy.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide for routing techniques for static, multi-path wireless networks that simplify the operation of such stations and that require wireless stations to use less energy in order to maximize the lifetime of each of the wireless stations and, therefore, the overall wireless network.
Co-pending patent application Ser. No. 10/879,062, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein as if set forth in full herein, discloses a novel architecture for static, multi-hop wireless networks. This architecture describes configurable access wireless networks (CANs) which include a controller that is responsible for determining the topology of a given network, as well as the routing paths (and packet transmission schedules) associated with each wireless station. By placing topological modeling and routing/scheduling decision-making into a controller instead of requiring each wireless station to complete such tasks, new routing techniques may be implemented that allow a station's operation to be simplified and which reduce the energy required by each station.
It is, therefore, further desirable to provide routing techniques that make use of a CAN architecture in order to provide simplified wireless stations and to allow wireless stations to use less energy in order maximize the lifetime of static, multi-hop wireless networks.